Lagos, Nigeria - In a candid admission that will shock many, the acting Chairman of Nigeria's anti-graft Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Mr. Ibrahim Lamorde, has said the agency itself is enmeshed in corruption.
“By the time I returned to the EFCC at the instance of the President, I was profoundly shocked to find that many of those I was supposed to send out to carry out the Commission’s mandate on certain individuals were themselves enmeshed in corruption,'' Lamorde, who was recently appointed acting Chairman of the agency, said.
“The patriotism and even idealism of 2003 (when the EFCC was established) had succumbed to the unrelenting onslaught of corruption; an undue dose of atavistic acquisitiveness and other personal interests had been injected into the war that it was inevitable for the anti-corruption effort to flounder so noticeably,'' he added.
The police officer, who spoke at a meeting in the capital city of Abuja Thursday, said the agency had started taking measures to ''clean up'' the system.
The actions include lie-detector tests for staffers two or three times a year, and the probe of the lifestyle and property of certain key officers.
So far, he said, four of them have lost the privilege to belong to the EFCC family and are answering questions in courts across the nation.
“EFCC had to do some introspection and we realised that we could ill-afford to raise a finger against the behemoth of corruption if we did not first put our house in order.
“We needed to tell ourselves the bitter truth, which is that the corruption we had been set up to fight, amongst other economic and financial crimes, had permeated the very fabric of the EFCC,'' he said.
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